Raid Mindset

So, on Sat night, we went in. After a ton of wipes in phase 1, and one in phase 2 (that was in between the phase 1 wipes) We killed Rhyloith. And to paraphrase our Raid Leader: “Why the f*** can’t you do this all the time?! I just saw you take Rhyloith down so smoothly Casually Addicted”, the top guild on our server,”would be jealous! And yet we’ve wiped to stupid s*** on other attempts. F*** switch are you all throwing to do stuff like this?” He’s constantly saying stuff like that. And, well, he has a point. We can go into Firelands, and for some reason on all the good attempts, everything goes smoothly. We’re communicating, we’re not standing in anything, we’re stacking or not stacking and getting everything down correctly and the dps range from 16-24k. I saw that on Shannox and Lord Rhy-Rhy, and, well, I agree with our raidleader.

We’re not in a raid mindset on the wipes. And when we are, we are quite capable of beating down anything we d*mn well want to with only a few attempts. I’m not sure why sometimes, the switch flips and we suddenly become, again steal words from Jjesse’s mouth, Paragon, or any top guild. I wish I knew how to make sure that in Firelands, it was always switched. It’s quite frustrating to wipe to Beth’tilac time after time– after we’ve seen her at 2% and if she just hadn’t eaten one spiderling, she’d be dead. We had to call it. WTF!?

So, I look at my healing. I look at who I’m healing, my overhealing, my HoT uptime, my activity, who died when. I’m proud to say that the part of the raid I heal is highly unlikely to die first. It happened once twice tonight, on a dozen or so wipes. One time, the spiderling killer was out of range, and one time I just didn’t get to the person fast enough, and I’m beating myself up about that. If they’d been alive, would we have had the kill? I try to make sure that I AM in raid mentality. That I AM doing everything I possibly can. That I’m bringing potions, cookies, flasks. Even though the guild provides feasts and cauldrons, we can run out of feasts. We all need to farm more. I try to use my warlock cookies, and I try to use tranquility every time I can use it and still have it when I need it. I’m certain there’s something I could do better. Maybe some reforging, I know that I’m not quite at a haste breakpoint and so I should either reforge to get to it or reforge to other stats until I can reach it. I give my innervate to other people. I still get 10% mana, and I have the luxury to potion of concentration, they don’t.

I know my raid group can kill the bosses when they’re in raid mentality. It really annoys me that sometimes, we’re not.

I know I did everything I could think of at the time, and it wasn’t enough to kill the boss. I know it’s not all on me. But f*** it, I feel like it is.